Woodland Hills training facility delay forces Rams to redo scrimmage schedule

The LA Rams were supposed to be holding a joint practice session on the road with the Los Angeles Chargers on August 14, 2024. Instead, the team will revisit the Dallas Cowboys in Oxnard to hold their joint practice. Was it a feud with the Chargers that necessitated the change of location? Or did the Rams have so much fun coming from behind to defeat the Cowboys, that they wanted to add insult to injury?

Well, before we get into the details, let's revisit the entire Joint Practice Schedule once more. The LA Rams had scheduled four joint practices before the start of the 2024 NFL season. As a reminder, the team uses those practices to give starters a chance to replicate game-like experiences. Sometimes those sessions have included scripted down and distances to allow coaches to evaluate players more objectively with comparative plays.

At other times, the practices have involved more game-like variables.

This year, teams are facing a new twist in that the kickoff play has been drastically altered. Some teams have begun to show their hands at creatively designing ways to use the new rules. So far, the Rams have been very conservative and have opted to settle for kicking into the end zone for a touchback.

So let's take a look at the joint practice schedule:

Joint Practice Schedule

So far, the Rams have held two joint practices, one with the Los Angeles Chargers and one with the Dallas Cowboys. Today's session with the Cowboys will enable starters to refresh their play-making skills against an unfamiliar opponent. The pace and variety of infusing these joint practices seem to give both participating teams solid takeaways from which to focus future practices.

This is the current joint practice schedule:

• Sunday, August 4 - @ Los Angeles Chargers
• Thursday, August 8 - @ Dallas Cowboys
• Wednesday, August 14 - @ Chargers, er, Cowboys
• Thursday, August 22 - @ Houston Texans

So why the change from Chargers to Rams?

Thank the delays to completing the team's training facilities at Woodland Hills. With the team in Thousand Oaks, the Rams would have faced a lengthy time-consuming commute to and from the Chargers site and El Segundo. Instead, the team opted to change opponents to shrink their commute time.

In the end, the team will get plenty of quality work for the players. And quality work now means a much better prepared team when the regular season begins. That first game of the 2024 NFL season is rapidly approaching.

Hopefully, this joint practice will conclude without any injuries. We had plenty of positives to talk about after the first Rams-Cowboys joint practice. Hopefully, we will have just as many positives to discuss after this joint practice session.

As always, thanks for reading.